The Morning GIF: If MST3K ran the debates

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

If politics is just show business for ugly people, where’s the razzle-dazzle lately? The choice is between the guy in the blue suit with the blue tie and the guy in the blue suit with the red tie. Some debates they stand behind podiums. Some debates they sit on stools (that’s how you can tell they’re “informal”). Some debates they sit at a table just out of arm’s reach so they don’t claw one another to death right there on-camera.

Although that would at least be entertaining.

So it is that we turn to cult favorite 80’s sci-fi tv show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K for short) for truly new ideas to bring excitement back to the political Thunderdome. MST3K had a simple premise: a schlubby janitor was shot into space by his malevolent bosses, who wanted to see what going insane from loneliness looked like. To keep himself sane, he built robot pals Tom Servo and Crow, and spent his time watching and heckling appallingly bad movies.

This was significantly more entertaining than it sounds.

Years after the show had gone off the air the writer and star Michael J. Nelson created Rifftrax— a site which features downloadable MST3K-style audio tracks by the series’ stars to liven up watching movies—and GIFftrax, a Tumblr which captions the relevant movie moments with pearls of wisdom from Mike, Crow and Tom Servo.

Throw in a scene from nonsensical clown-centric flick The Day the Earth Froze (which is actually just an appallingly edited version of the Finnish art flick Sampo) and you have a debate format guaranteed to please, or at least mystify.

It’s too late for this election cycle, but imagine the fun we’ll all have next time, watching Hillary and Romney going at it in full clown regalia.